Since their commercial introduction to the United States in the 1920's, consumer use of payment cards, such as credit cards, debit cards, and the like, for facilitating financial transactions in many western societies has grown rapidly. For example, as of 2010, there are an estimated 1.6 billion credit cards in use in the United States alone.
While payment card use has been widely adopted in some countries, not everybody has or uses payment cards. For example, credit card use is very limited in developing countries. For another example, even in developed countries, people may not use credit cards due to security concerns or credit problems. However, with the increasing availability and use of mobile telephones, especially in developing countries where credit card use is limited, people without credit cards often have a mobile telephone. Like credit card users, people with mobile telephones would like the advantages of performing financial transactions without the hand-to-hand exchange of actual currency.
There are numerous ways in which one person may transfer money to another person. For example, the sender may directly deposit funds into a bank account of the recipient, or may electronically transfer funds to a bank account of the recipient. However, these techniques typically require the sender to have knowledge of personal or financial information of the recipient, and fail to exploit the proliferance of and increasing computational power of mobile telephones.
Further, mobile telephone operators, such as Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc., have the infrastructure for facilitating telephone calls between land and mobile telephones. However, they typically do not have the infrastructure for performing the mechanics underlying many financial transactions, an infrastructure which is often provided by payment processing networks such as those provided by Visa, Inc. and Mastercard, Inc. It is thus desirable to integrate the mobile telephone systems with the payment processing networks. This integration is challenging, however, since payment processing networks are structured to operate using a 16-digit primary account number (PAN) where the first 6 digits identify an issuer of the card and the entire 16-digit PAN identifies an account associated with the customer, whereas mobile telephone networks are structured to operate using a 10-digit telephone number.
Embodiments of this disclosure address these and other problems, individually and collectively.